The Summer Queen

by Joan D. Vinge

  Moon hugged her, smiling. “Well, I—”

  “Moon, I need to talk with you about the newest studies we’ve been doing on the mersong. I’m running short on inspiration, and I need input.” Miroe caught at her with his eyes, nodding toward the house, where they had already spent half the day discussing new ways to encourage Summers to accept the technology that was changing their lives almost daily.

  “Come on, Mama.” Tammis clung to her other hand.

  Moon felt her mouth tighten, seeing the silver stretch of beach waiting, feeling her children’s need pulling at her, and Miroe’s. “I can’t right now.…”

  “Mama! You promised—”

  Moon frowned, caught in a tightening vise of frustration.

  “You’ve played with me half the morning,” Sparks said. “You can run on the beach by yourselves a while. Build a city in the sand, like Carbuncle—”

  “But Mama promised—”

  “You come with us now, children,” Gran said, moving forward to pry them loose from Moon’s arms. “You haven’t been with us, either, and your mother has work that must be done,” regardless of what I think of it, her eyes said, “like her mother before her, and even I myself, in my day. But now I have time to walk barefoot in the sand! Come on, Borah…” She enlisted his support with a jerk of her head. He took Merovy by the hand as Gran pulled Tammis and Ariele half reluctantly away down the hill. “Mama—!” Tammis called plaintively, one last time.

  “Nobody’s stirring the paddies! Your seahair crop is going to rot, Miroe Ngenet!” Borah waved a hand at the empty fields. “What good will all your technology do when you all starve to death?”

  “I’ve automated,” Miroe shouted back. “Wind-powered wavemakers. Worry about your own crops!”

  “Automated, you say—?” Borah called, but Miroe was already turning away, waving his hand in disgust.

  “Go south around the bay!” Jerusha called. “There was a storm the day before yesterday. There will be wonderful shells along the bay. Maybe you’ll even find fog-agates.”

  “Will we see mers?”

  “Not so soon after the storm—” Moon shook her head, waving, a half-hearted, reluctant gesture of farewell. She turned away from the sight of them, her eyes suddenly stinging. “All right, Miroe,” she said, to the unspoken apology in his glance, “let’s talk about the mers.”

  Sparks fell into step beside her as they began to walk back up the hill. Miroe glanced at him. “I don’t think this is your area of expertise, Dawntreader.”

  Sparks frowned slightly. “I’ve been studying the mersong, and I think I may have found a clue to the—”

  “Jerusha, why don’t you take him down to the factory?” Miroe gestured across the bay.

  “I’ve seen the factory. I want to talk about the mers.”

  Miroe turned abruptly to face him. “After what you did to them, you have no right.”

  Sparks stopped in his tracks, and Moon saw the desolation that emptied his eyes like death. She looked back at Miroe, his stare as black and hard as flint, and said nothing, did nothing, as the past breathed on them all with the cold breath of Winter. She followed Miroe on up the hill, gazing at the cloud-hung, distant peaks. Sparks did not follow.

  * * *

  Sparks watched them until they were out of range of his voice. Jerusha PalaThion was still standing beside him; he wondered why he was not completely alone. He took a deep breath at last, and turned to face her. “Why don’t you make it unanimous?” he said.

  “Because I don’t think you deserved that,” she answered, meeting his gaze.

  “Why not?” He looked away again, feeling something gnawing like worms inside him. “I butchered mers for Arienrhod, so she could sell the water of life, so we could stay young together by committing genocide. You know what I did; you saw what I did—just like him. He’s right; I’m guilty.”

  She looked at him for a long moment without speaking. “That wasn’t you…” she said finally, “that was Arienrhod. You were only a boy. You were no match for a woman like her. She’d been committing soul cannibalism for a hundred and fifty years. She nearly destroyed us all.”

  His hands tightened. “Give me more credit than that. I knew what I was doing. You used to believe that, when you hated my guts as Commander of Police.”

  “I hated Starbuck, the Queen’s butcher, just like I hated the Queen. I didn’t know Sparks Dawntreader, then, any more than I knew Moon Dawntreader. I thought I did, but I was wrong.” She shook her head. “I was a Blue, and I thought I was a good judge of character … I still think so. Moon told me you’d never been what you were for Arienrhod, before; she said you’d never be like that again. She made me believe in her because she wore a trefoil. I wasn’t so sure about you. But she was right. I’ve known you for nearly ten years now. You’re a good man.”

  He looked after Moon’s retreating back, at Miroe’s tall, broad-shouldered silhouette towering over her, making her look small and fragile. He looked back at Jerusha, and suddenly he was not afraid to meet her eyes, for the first time since he could remember. “Thank you,” he said finally, softly.

  She nodded. “My pleasure.”

  He looked toward Miroe’s retreating back again. “But ten years hasn’t changed his mind.”

  “That’s another thing I’ve learned,” she murmured. “He’s not an easy man to reach.”

  Sparks heard the bitter disappointment in the words, and wanted suddenly to reach out to her. He did not, because there was something of her husband’s intangible armor about her too. “How can I make him listen to me, at least? Is there any way?”

  She shifted from foot to foot, her eyes thoughtful. “He’s a determined man; he’s self-righteous, and won’t be easily shaken out of what he believes.… But he respects determination in other people.” She looked back at him. “If you want to tell him your ideas about the mers, go and do it. Don’t let him shut you out. Stand your ground.” A slow smile came out on her face. “It’s worth a try. It’s how I got him to admit he loved me.”

  Sparks laughed; he nodded, his smile fading again. “All right. I will.” He glanced toward the house. “Are you coming?”

  She shook her head, looking toward the beach, where the small group of young and old were gathered in the ageless pursuit of digging miracles out of the sand. “Not me. This is your fight, I’d just be in the way.” She stretched her arms. “For once I’m going to the beach.” She glanced back at him. “Good luck,” she said, and strode away down the slope of rippling salt grass.

  Sparks watched her for a moment, until he realized that he was not really envious, and then he began to climb the hill. A dozen windscrews whirled almost silently above him, scattered across the land like surreal flowers, turning the wind’s restless energy into energy for humans to use, to keep the water in constant motion in the beds of cultivated sea hair, to provide electricity for light and power in the growing sprawl of the manufacturing plant Ngenet had been constructing on the far side of his small harbor. There was a village growing up around it, where Winter workers had come to live and raise their families; old-style dwellings built in old-style ways to mark a new-style life.

  He reached the plantation house that lay at the hill’s crest like an immense cairn, its solid, century-old stone and wood construction reminding him of the houses of his youth; reminding him again that the people of this world. Winter and Summer, shared a common heritage because they faced common problems of survival. He wondered why it was so easy for them to forget that. It was the perversity of all human beings, that they forgot their humanity so easily, and nursed their bitter memories for so long.…

  Sparks went in through the heavy iron-hinged door, found Miroe and Moon sitting at a low table spread with handwritten documents among the uneasy mix of offworld heirlooms and stolid native furniture that gave this house its unique personality.

  They looked up at him, Moon in surprise, and Ngenet in something closer to anger. “What do you want?” he dema
nded.

  “I want you to listen to my ideas, Ngenet.” Sparks held himself straighter, settling his hands on his hips. “Shut your eyes if you have to, if having to look me in the face makes you sick. But hear me out.”

  Ngenet stiffened, glancing at Moon. But Moon’s eyes were on his own, with a mixture of pride and urgency, telling him he had done the right thing, strengthening his resolve.

  He sat down with them as if he had been invited, making them a triad—Lady’s luck, he told himself, feeling irony pinch him. Ngenet studied Moon’s face a moment longer, looked away again with what seemed to be resignation. His glance flicked back to Sparks; he closed his eyes, deliberately. “All right,” he said. “I’m listening.”

  Sparks took a deep breath, finding himself unexpectedly at the center of attention. He glanced away, gazing into the fire that burned in the stone hearth beyond Ngenet’s back. “Even when I was a boy in the islands, I used to play the flute.…” He touched the pouch at his belt, where he kept his shell flute. “I knew all the old songs everyone sang; but when I played them on the flute they sounded different … They reminded me of the mer songs; the way they were constructed, the timbre, the intervals between notes and the tonal slides. I didn’t know the terms or understand the relationships then.…” He smiled, at Moon’s face as she watched him; at the memory of that other time, their lost world. “But my ears knew. After I came to the city, and—” and Arienrhod found me, “and I had access to what tech data the offworlders gave us, I began to learn the mathematics of music. How what I’d thought was just … instinct, beautiful noise, was actually a matrix, a network of relationships, each note with its own exact resonating wavelength, in a precise location relative to all the others.…”

  “So?” Ngenet said, impatiently.

  “So, I’ve kept on studying the relationships between the mersong and our songs, even the notes of the tone boxes we used to cross the Hall of Winds, which are actually surprisingly similar.” He saw Moon straighten up in surprise. She looked at him strangely, and he could not guess what it was that she was thinking. He forced himself to look away without asking, to go on speaking while he had the chance.

  “What’s the point?” Ngenet snapped. “Don’t waste my time.” His weather-beaten face was furrowed with frown lines; his dark, hooded eyes were still pitiless and cold like the wind. Ngenet was the last of a family of offworlders who had gone native in the Tiamatan outback, and he loved this world and all its parts obsessively. He had tried to protect the mers on his plantation from the Hunt. But Arienrhod had sent her Starbuck to his shores at Winter’s end for one final, illegal harvesting. All their scattered fates had been brought into collision on that bitter day, on that hideous stretch of beach, by the tightening of the Snow Queen’s fist. And none of them had escaped unscarred.

  Sparks glanced at Moon, saw his own sudden pain mirrored in her eyes. Their shifting colors were like memories, shimmering reflections on the surface of water. He swallowed the hard knot of his unexpected grief. “I … The point … the point is that I believe there may be segments missing from the mersong. Parts of it fall into patterns, meaningful enough to be fragments of something greater. But there are gaps.…” He had begun to talk with Moon about Ngenet’s work years ago, at first out of what must have been a kind of masochistic guilt. But from his need to atone there had come a cleaner, purer interest in the mersong, as it fed his curiosity about the nature of their music, and music in general.

  He had studied the recorded data until he was certain the songs the mers sang were something separate from the simple tonal language they used to communicate with one another. The tapes were filled with complex, almost indecipherable polyphonic strands of alien sound, lasting sometimes for hours. But they were songs in the true sense, as distinct and unchanging for each mer colony as they were varied among those separate groups. Each extended family within the colony seemed to possess a different musical strand, passed on by the adults to their small number of young, over countless generations as humans counted time. Blended together the strands comprised something greater, the pattern of which he had only begun to sense in the past few weeks.

  “I’ve been studying the recordings you’ve made, charting the melodies, and it seems to me that with the—slaughter decimating their numbers over and over, maybe they’ve lost the purpose of the songs themselves, along with specific passages of them. Even when the offworlders are gone, the mers reproduce slowly; it takes at least the century they have to rebuild their population. It wouldn’t be surprising if parts of their songs were lost forever. But if we could somehow reconstruct what’s missing, we actually might understand them, maybe even give back to them some of what they’ve lost.”

  Ngenet sat forward slowly. Sparks realized suddenly that the older man’s eyes were open and looking at him … waiting to meet his gaze. “That makes sense,” Ngenet said slowly, as if it pained him to admit it.

  Sparks bit his tongue, and smiled. He glanced at Moon’s face, at the fascination and respect and, suddenly, the unquestioning love he saw there. Her smile widened.

  Ngenet leaned forward on the heavy-framed couch, his hands locked together, his knuckles like burls on wood. “Take a look at what we have here. And tell me more about your methods—how did you come to this idea? Do you have your data with you?”

  “I can get it.” Sparks pushed to his feet, still hardly believing he had heard the other man speak those words, that his own words had been listened to, when he had lived so long with Ngenet’s unspoken censure. He had done his solitary research for what seemed like an eternity, seeking the key that would grant him free access to the work Moon shared with Ngenet—grant him the hope, however small, that one day he would not see hatred and loathing, pity or pain, in the eyes of everyone who knew the truth … including his own eyes … including the eyes of his wife.

  He hesitated, as he heard the sound of dogs barking and the excited voices of children coming toward the house.

  Ngenet pushed to his feet, with annoyance showing on his face again; but this time his gaze was directed toward the windows, the threatened interruption.

  “Mama! Mama!” Ariele burst through the front door, flushed and breathless, barely skidding to a stop in time to avoid a collision with the table below the window. “Da!” she added, seeing her father standing distractedly with the others. “We found mers!”

  Mild surprise filled Ngenet’s face, momentarily replacing his annoyance at the interruption.

  “It’s a good sign that you saw mers, Ari,” Moon said, getting up, “but we’re—”

  “On the beach! On the beach!” Ariele cried, as more figures entered the house. Sparks turned as Jerusha entered, her heavy boots clumping on the wooden floor, something heavy and child-sized held in her arms. He froze, until he realized that the other two children were flanking her. “Dead!” Ariele went on. “But look, we found a baby—” She darted back to Jerusha’s side, hovering protectively by the bundle held face-high in front of her, her eyes wide as she touched it, stroking it gently.

  Sparks stood where he was, suddenly as strengthless as if it had been a child of his in Jerusha’s arms, while Moon and Ngenet rose from their seats and moved past him. He watched them go to Jerusha, the conversation they had all just been having forgotten as utterly as he was himself. Ngenet shooed the children aside; they stood back obediently, impressed by his sudden intentness.

  “Still alive—?” he asked, answering the question for himself as he ran experienced hands over the merling, and studied its small, unresponsive face. It made a tiny whimpering as he opened its eye; the fragile thread of sound turned Sparks cold inside. He looked away, his hands remembering the velvet soft texture of their thick fur; wanting to move forward, to stand with the rest, but unable to, unnoticed, unwanted—

  “We found an adult female too,” Jerusha said, “but she was already dead.”

  “What killed her?” Ngenet asked. Sparks looked back at them, found Moon’s gaze on his face; she
looked away again abruptly.

  “I don’t know.” Jerusha shook her head. “There was nothing wrong that I could see. Maybe the storm—” The mers had no natural enemies, except their creators.

  Sparks let his breath out. Jerusha glanced at him as if she had sensed his response; only then did he realize that he had been expecting to hear her speak his name, blaming him.

  Ngenet shrugged, glancing up as Borah Clearwater and Gran came into the house. “Or parasites, or bad food … but usually the colony keeps watch when one of their own is in trouble. To find them all alone like that is damned rare. And so is finding a young one, at this time in the High Year.…” He reached out to take the merling from Jerusha’s arms, but she resisted, rocking slowly, almost unthinkingly, from foot to foot, like a mother rocking her child. Ngenet’s expression changed, and he let his hands drop. “Maybe they were separated from the rest by the storm. Or maybe…” He shook his head again. “I don’t understand it. But this one will starve before the day is out, let alone before we locate the colony, if we don’t take care of it right now.” He started out of the room, already calling to someone in the kitchen.

  “Will a colony take in an orphan?” Moon asked, her own eyes on the small head resting listlessly against Jerusha’s shoulder.

  “I’ve never encountered a solitary merling before,” Ngenet said. “We’ll find out.” Mers separated forcibly from their own kind invariably died, but he did not mention that. He paused, giving directions to the startled cook who had appeared in the doorway, sending her off again in search of something suitable to feed a young mer.

  “What if the mers don’t want their baby back, Uncle Miroe?” Tammis asked, his eyes dark with concern as he gazed at the merling. “Will it be all alone? Who will take care of it?”

  Ngenet glanced over at the boy, a smile cracking the shell of his preoccupation. He had studied the mers for a lifetime, but even he knew little concrete about their society, the relationships they formed or did not form, how they raised their young. “Then we’ll keep the baby here. But we’ll worry about that later. First we’ll make the baby strong and healthy.”